Can anyone help me locate an archived file?

[Billy Walsh]

Hello, I am inexperienced with the creation kit and have been progressively making a race mod. I was tweaking some values of a bound bow and arrows, now when I play in game the game crashes when I reach a certain spot in the game world. If I walk toward the crash site it crashes, but if I walk the other direction, no crash. I removed several of my recently added mods, verified the game cache, and then uninstalled and reinstalled the game, the problem continued. To make sure what the problem was I ran the game without the race mod and when I reached the usual crash location there is a hiccup but then the game continues. (up to this point I have probably played for over 30 hours with the race mod and no problems until I significantly cranked up the speed and range of custom bound arrows, meaning speed is at 22000 and range is around 300,000) IDK why tweaking the speed and range of a bound bow and bound arrows would cause crashes, but I was going to try to separate the bound bow modifications from the race mod to create 2 files, I started messing with the File>Create archive>pack files button in the creation kit, when I clicked my race mod it entered the archive which immediately closed without giving an option where to store it. Now I can't figure out where to find the archive containing my race mod and can't play with or modify it any more. Any help locating and recovering the archive with the race mod would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[Truhvanor]

The archive and the mod file should both be in your skyrim/data folder (<modname>.esp and <modname>.bsa) but for the changes you've made i don't think an archive would be neccessary.
You could also open the "backup" folder inside your skyrim installation there might be some .bak files but i don't have any idea how to use them just google it and i'm sure you'll find something usefull.

[Billy Walsh]

Thanks for your help. I went to the data folder and did a search for "archive" but nothing came up. There is an archive.exe in common>skyrim folder, description says it is an archive creation tool. The creation kit archive removed the mod.esp from the data folder, but I did find the .bak backup copy, so I guess I will proceed to google that. Thanks again.

[NH_]

you only need to change the file extension .bak to .esp

[Billy Walsh]

I finally managed to do that. Had to make file extensions viewable in tools>folder options>view in the menu bar. Thanks for your help. Problem solved.